What I really, really wish Bioware had focused on when it came to defeating the reapers is the singular advantage our cycle had. Every previous cycle lost all chance at survival the moment the reapers came out of dark space, because the reapers took the Citadel, and therefore the relays. With the reapers in control of the relays system, they cut off travel, communication, and obliterate supply lines.
Everyone in every previous cycle was cut off and isolated before they even knew what hit them. If they didn’t even know the reapers existed, it might be years, even decades before they knew what happened at all! There would be no way to share intel, to warn others about reaper movements, etc. A society that developed to rely on the relays would be utterly crippled without them, and every previous cycle lost the relays in the opening minutes of an attack they didn’t even know was coming.
Except us. Our cycle kept the Citadel. When the reapers showed up we still had control of it AND the relays. We were the first cycle in the history of the reapers to keep that advantage - because of the prothean scientists on Ilos. It's really an incredible thing when you think about it.
The previous cycles couldn't evacuate, fall back and mount a defense with their allies. They couldn’t reach safety. Without the relays there was nowhere to go! All the reapers had to do was go system by system to wipe everyone out systematically, and all that any previous cycle could do was wait until they were next and fight the best they could with what they had available.
The crucible is such an insane concept because there would have been no way to pull it off. You don't have the resources, the labor, the logistics, to even begin to build it, because you don't have the relays to move the resources or the people where they need to be. And even more insane, the battery for the whole damn thing was the Citadel, which every previous cycle lost access to in the opening minutes of the initial attack!
Even if the protheans or anyone else could have found a way to build it, there would have been no way to use it. Why in the world would you base your MacGuffin on something so inaccessible?
If you had to use the Crucible as your win button, it could have been interesting if you looked at it not as something that everyone else ran out of time to build, but as something other cycles had conceived of and had no way to build - but we did. At a cost.
The reapers are here. We might still have comm buoys and the relays, but the reapers are still killing billions, destroying strategic locations and wreaking havoc with supply lines. So if you are diverting supplies to build the Crucible...who are you taking them from? Whose front collapses because you took what they needed to build that thing? Who gets fucked over because this ship had to mine minerals to build the crucible instead of run supplies to refugees? A war table like you had in DA:I could have been so interesting in Mass Effect 3.
The fact that the protheans reached through time and made one, small change that dramatically changed the way the reapers harvest a cycle had so much potential. We were different. We had a chance no one else ever had, not just because Shepard is a badass, but because a small group of people who had no hope for themselves decided to have hope for someone else. We weren’t better than other cycles – we were gifted something no one else got: the protheans broke the cycle. We didn’t. They did.
I wish the game hadn’t forgotten that, and I wish the ending would have found a way to tie back to that. Instead of boiling the end of the trilogy down to an RGB choice between control, destroy, and synthesis, I wish it had celebrated the truth that we are nothing without our differences. We are nothing without each other. We could bring a bunch of disparate organic and synthetic races together to fight for each other’s right to exist because the people who came before us performed a selfless act to help a future they would never see.
